How Alice and Bob meet if they don't like onions

Survey of Network Anonymisation Techniques

There exists no such thing as a perfect anonymity network with low latency, low bandwith consumption which provides strong anonymity.
Popular anonymisation networks rightfully focus on Web browsing, because that is the most popular application on todays Internet. The most popular anonymisation network is, rightfully so, Tor. You might, however, not have the requirements that mandate the use of the Tor network and thus are looking for alternatives.
In this talk, we present alternatives to the popular Tor anonymisation network and examine what they achieve and how they differ.

With the popularity of the Web came the popularity of anonymisation communication networks (ACNs) catering for the Web context. That means in particular low latency. Generally, though, anonymisation networks can be classified by different properties such as anonymity goals, strength of adversary or application area.

In this talk we present alternative ACNs to the popular Tor network and their goals. We explain their architectures, properties, and how they achieve anonymity. In particular, we will look at JonDonym, I2P, Freenet, and GNUnet as well as ongoing research projects such as Loopix, Vuvuzela, and Riffle.

We will see that once you understand your requirements, you can optimise your choice of anonymisation networks according to your needs.